In managed network information systems, information exchange is facilitated through the use of an application layer protocol. The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has become a standard application layer protocol in managing devices in such systems. In general, systems using SNMP contain network managers and network agents. The agents communicate with the actual devices to be managed by the system. The devices to be managed on the system can be any device such as a printer, an industrial device that contains a network interface and the like. For example, a user may want to read the output of a temperature sensor on an industrial device or monitor an out-of-toner indicator on a remote printer. Because the managed objects do not communicate in SNMP, the monitoring and managing of the devices by using an agent requires a creation of a Management Information Base (MIB). The MIB is a virtual information database used by the agents.
One of the difficulties with such a system involves defining the various protocols used by the managed devices for translation by an agent. Normally, the MIB needs to be updated when a change is made to the configuration of managed devices. Updating usually requires re-compiling the MIB database to incorporate the changes. Without an agent, users need to understand all of the nuances of each of many possible query/response protocols existing for the managed devices. However a user may not be interested in exhaustively managing a remote device. The user may only be interested in a subset of the attributes of the device. What is needed is an improved means for a user to communicate with remote devices.